• August is the last month of my employer’s financial year, which means preparing for annual appraisals just as everyone is using up their leave – and this is on top of client work. While I’m enjoying being busy, it’s also been tiring.
• We finished off our internal Summer of Q, where about 40 of us explored agentic AIs for coding. It’s one of several things I need to write up before I forget about them. I love working with agentic AI, but doing it effectively will take some more work.
• I continue to think about Sean Goedecke’s essays on value, alongside his one on Pure and Impure Software Engineering. I’m mentioning Goedecke in most of my weeknotes recently. I have been rereading some of his pieces and want to put them into practise when I start a new role in September.
• My new role involves React, so it’s time to get to grips with that properly.

Links

• From Noah Brier’s Things I think about AI: “If models didn’t progress from what we have today, we’d still have 10 years of runway to integrate their value into corporations and society.”
• I’m not convinced that about the power of agentic coding with tools like Kiro and AmazonQ. But I do think there is a use for small, focussed tools. Bill Mill gives a good example of this with a code review tool.
• Two good checklists on agentic coding techniques:
  • AI Gives Time, Not Confidence: Developer Productivity Toolkit by Jonathan Vila
  • Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)

• It’s been a few weeks since my last weeknotes. I had a restful holiday in Wales and a lot of work things to catch up on.
• I’ve been thinking a lot about Sean Godecke’s essays on the role of a programmer in the current economy, and the need to provide demonstrable value – particularly for seniors and managers. This is shaping my approach to my work.
• I wrote a post about how The Joel Test turned 25 this month, looking at its historical importance and pondering what a modern Joel test might include.
• In another flight of nostalgia I looked up Brad Fitzpatrick and Lisa Philip’s notes on scaling Livejournal, which were a useful reference for scaling Flirtomatic many years ago.
• I continued my experiments with Amazon Q and learned a lot. I should have those written up by the end of the month.

Links

• The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey has been published, although it may be a few weeks before I get around to reading this properly.
• Another great piece from Charity Majors was In Praise of ‘Normal‘ Engineers, where she talks about the importance of teams rather than individual developers, and how systems must be easy to use: “The best engineering orgs are the ones where normal engineers can do great work”
• Sean Goedecke’s What’s Going to Happen to Junior Engineers was a good exploration of the potential long-term meaning of the fall in junior tech positions.
• The conclusions of Anthropic’s Project Vend feel quite speculative, but it raises some interesting questions: “we think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon… the AI won’t have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost in some cases… we don’t know if AI middle managers would actually replace many existing jobs or instead spawn a new category of businesses”.
• Welcoming the Next Generation of Programmers argues that vibe coders are programmers and it’s important to onboard and welcome them to the existing developer communities.
• Christina Wodtke posted on linkedin about how a lot of Gen-X programmers have the same passion for GenAI as for the early web – in a way that didn’t happen with blockchain or VR (via Simon Willison)

Books

Tidy First by Kent Beck

I read Kent Beck’s Tidy First? while away – some thought-provoking ideas, but they rely on being able to produce and merge changes easily. Again, I need to find time to write up my notes.

• I drafted some notes last week, but didn’t press publish, so these notes are two weeks’ worth.
• A client colleague prompted me to make more use of Copilot in Teams. It’s hugely useful, but there’s a gap between reading and writing in all these tools – it’s too easy to copy and paste the application summary rather than edit it (particularly if you have another meeting to get to, since the context disappears when you move away). It’s going to be interesting to see how helpful this proves in the long run.
• I wonder if remote working is increasing the number of meetings as it is so easy to book them – and cameras off means that there are people multi-tasking, rather than looking bored in the room. There’s no feedback to prompt people to push back against the calls.
• I’ve been playing with AmazonQ. The UX is an atrocity, but the tool itself impressive and compelling. There are however, a lot of subtleties about how this would work as a development workflow, and how it will scale up to use in large organisations. I’m using the Nilenso piece on AI-coding as a guideline. I made a post about my initial response to Q and another one about my second week.

Links

• I’ve been catching up on Sean Goedecke’s excellent writing. In Do Not Yell at the Language Model he talks about how berating a language model for mistakes might create a negative context, producing worse results.
• Peter Hilton describes an amazing lightning talk, where Chris Oldwood told programming jokes for 5 minutes. Hilton goes on to imagine a book of 97 Jokes Every Programmer Should Know, suggesting that such jokes are a good way to learn some aspects of programming. “There are 10 kinds of programmers: those who understand binary, those who don’t, and those who weren’t expecting a base 3 joke.”
• Charity Majors wrote an interesting piece, On How Long it Takes to Know if a Job is Right for You or Not, in which she talks about the need for alignment between a manager’s values and the company they work for.
• The striking thing about Bo Frese’s The 13 Ways We Kill High-Performing Agile Teams was how often these occur, despite going against well-known best practise. Also interesting to see that the scrum guide had removed ‘the three questions’ as a stand-up practise.
• Good retros are hard, and Who Needs Action Items by Daniel Cooper is a good piece on this. “Eventually, people stop bringing anything that actually matters and it’ll all be fluff. No one wants to accidentally become the owner of ‘improve emotional tone in retros (Q3 OKR)’.”

Books

I completed a re-read of Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained, which I last read back around 2001. I have a lot of notes to reflect on, but the biggest surprise was how little empirical evidence Beck had for his theories. Which is not to say I think Beck is wrong per se, rather that his insights are based on a particular set of experiences. There was also some provocative thoughts about documentation which goes against what I think, and is worth interrogating.

• I’ve been working this week on mongo replicasets and I’m very impressed with their resilience, particularly the use of an intelligent client in the driver to handle failover etc.
• As part of an initiative at work, I started playing with Amazon Q, initially asking it to generate some basic arcade games. First impression was to be impressed at the simple examples produced, while being aware of the challenge in getting precise results from a coding agent. Something I need to spend more time on.

Links

• An excellent post from Sean Goedecke, AI Interpretability is further along than I thought, talks about internals of language models – it was a useful reminder of why telling a chatbot that it’s an expert works.
• AI-assisted coding for teams that can’t get away with vibes (via Simon Willison) was a useful primer on large-scale coding with GenAI. A useful rule here was ‘what helps the human helps the AI’, including linting, CI/CD, documentation and clearly defined features. Some good examples around prompting, and how AIs are used to build the prompts to code from. The most interesting bit, and something I’d like to go back to, is the claim that the DRY principle is less useful when working with LLMs. This is a living document being maintained by nilenso, which I will have to keep an eye.
• Could HTTP 402 be the Future of the Web was a good speculative article about the need for micropayments and how charging AI crawlers could lead to that.
• Some excellent words of wisdom from Everything is Prioritization: “If you’re remote and still free frazzled, you’re not doing remote wrong. You’re just prioritizing availability over impact.” The article talks about the need to avoid tempting distractions: “The best teams aren’t full of geniuses. They’re full of people who keep their focus and say ‘no’ without having a breakdown”.
• I’ve long disliked the cargo cult metaphor, and this is deconstructed in The origin of the cargo cult metaphor, which points out a lot of the errors and miscomprehension in the popular understanding of actual cargo cults. “The cargo cult metaphor is best avoided”.
• Simon Willison’s Identify, solve, verify is a short piece on the role of the programmer in the era of GenAI. “The more time I spend using LLMs for code, the less I worry about my career”.
• The Elegance Question: What Makes Some Systems Just Work? set out some simple principles for building ‘elegant’ systems. This was thought-provoking, particularly around the question of why so many systems go against these principles.

Books

No time for reading this week – and I’ve been distracted by a non-tech book.

• I’m going to try writing a few weeknotes to see how they feel. I need some way to consolidate everything I’m reading and thinking about, but longer blog posts are not coming together. These weeknotes will help me track my technical interests – and hopefully help me find interesting blog posts when I need to refer back to them.
• Last Sunday, I had an interesting conversation with Laurence where I found myself asking whether agile is too hard for most teams. Laurence pointed out out that the core of agile is simple, but it does place a lot of demand on developers. I think the widely perceived failures of agile need much more consideration.
• In another discussion with Laurence, I realised how vital GenAI skills will be for technical managers – there is a huge change in software development coming and staying current will require understanding those skills – not least to be able to support and unblock those who use them most.
• Something I’ve not blogged about over the past few weeks is the decline of stack overflow. It’s been interesting to see how the references for learning technical skills have changed over the years.
• One of the things I like most about working in a large consultancy is the number of talks and activities going on. An ‘unadvent of code’ group has started to look at the Advent of Code puzzles from 2018. This has got me playing with Go as a coding activity, which I’m enjoying.

Links

• I watched the video Java for AI by Java Library Architect Paul Sandoz – another example of the Java platform’s strength as a combination of JVM, libraries. It’s will be good to see Java become a first-class platform for AI
• AI Is Poised to Re-write History is an interesting article looking at GenAI as a reading machine rather than a writing machine. It also interviews Mark Humphries, who was discussed in the excellent Feb 2024 Verge article How AI can make history

Reading

Writing for Developers

I started reading this book, a recommendation from my colleague Matt. The book could probably be titled ‘Blogging for Developers’, and it’s interesting to see someone writing such a book in 2025. I like the book, but I definitely have philosophical differences with it, in that it focusses on blogging as a way to go viral, sometimes neglecting the more personal uses of blogging (such as weeknotes). A good counterpoint occurs in Simon Willison’s piece on keeping a link blog.